I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis!

Now I'm gaining weight (although not enough for a booster), lonely, and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.

I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me.

Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.

Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.

Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.

These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(.

> and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.

Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.

I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage.

Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.

all of the complaints about remote work are more about the pandemic rather than remote work

Just go and bike for two hours around the block and don't bother people fine with wfh.

It's literally something nobody is preventing you from doing (besides yourself).

Second: you are dismissing the fact that having an office to go to gave a lot of people a routine as well as forced social interaction. Now, it requires strict discipline to try and enforce it on yourself, whereas before it was a default.

I share this commenter’s experience. That you don’t is fantastic for you, but doesn’t make it any less legitimate.

Rudeness here is in the eyes of those who call it that.

You even express your frustration directly in a sibling comment below.

Pretending your comment wasn’t rude, especially after elsewhere expressing your explicit frustration, is only half-true at best.

Have a nice day. :)

They are fearful that people with your stance will give companies a better argument for less remote-work. It's one thing when executives talk about it, because they're "not on the ground" and "just want control" or "don't understand individual contributors", but when peers like you support non-100% remote, it's a real worrisome prospect for them.

Edit: Recommending they find a coworking space they can bike to and work from could have been a nicer suggestion (assuming pandemic ever goes away)

I agree with you there.

The problem with WFH is that it doesn't force very many "transitions," which turns a lot more things into intentional acts that take more mental energy to initiate. The result it it's a lot easier to slide into a "blah" kind of state without even realizing it, and a lot harder to pull yourself out of one.

But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason.

It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other physical activity it's probably going to get better.

I'm not so sure.

> But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason.

> ...but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office...

You're projecting that on him. He was just saying working at the office was better for him than WFH, he didn't actually advocate forcing anyone back, which was even made reasonably clear when he said:

>>>> Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before.

You might want to re-read their comment — there was no call for everyone to go back to the office, and the parent comment is right that you're being antagonizing for no reason.

Here's an analogy for you: I had a childhood I very much enjoyed, where I wasn't on the computer as often and I spent more time in nature. If I were to state this and how much happier I felt, would you start harassing me for trying to drag everyone back to the dark ages and ruining productivity? (No! I can express my own personal opinion and preference, just as you can express yours, and it's not automatically a call for everyone to do the same as me!)

This is why both sides are so fired up over remote vs in-person. Your decision to work either remotely or in person has negative consequences for your co-workers either way. WFH folks are mad that they are being asked to commute, in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.

That's actually a good point. Conference speakerphones are garbage, so once one needed person is remote, everyone has to dial in. The experience is really only workable if everyone is using a headset.

> in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.

This isn't just a side effect of WFH, offshoring/distributed teams force it too. Even before the pandemic, most of my co-located team's meetings were online, since we almost always had to accommodate someone who was based at another site.

To go a little off-topic, there are a lot of good arguments against open office plans, but weirdly the one that seemed hardest for advocates to shrug off was the difficulty of having a bunch of co-located people joining the same call, and having to deal with echo. I think that's because it challenged the assumption that work happened mainly in a very particular co-located way (e.g. like a bunch of people sitting at consoles in a mission control center).

And that is why you should seek remote only companies if possible. Add in asynchronous work culture. Let the "productive" people waste their time in video meetings.

If you're waiting for multi-day turnaround times on agreements because there's back and forth where two parties are trying to have a debate over requirements in a document but both only check for updates every few hours, I'd argue you're not being as "productive" as you think.

It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.

Oh, and what stops you from doing that in an async company? If the meeting is justified, that is. It's the other 98% of meetings that you get rid of.

And incidentally, why "everyone in a room" and not "everyone in a group chat"?

If most employers make people return to office, are people just going to drop exercising? Would it not be fair to call that ridiculous?

The problem you lament are due to covid, not due to wfh.

And covid it's not an incident, its a f-ing global pandemic.

Yes and in turn translates to better quality work. In my case, I'm consciously adding extra web dev cherries on top every chance I can.

I haven't set foot in the office since the beginning of 2020, mostly due to lockdown. My boss is okay with it because he's happy with my work. I will never go back, I'd quit first.

Things I don't miss:

* The shared microwave always covered with a layer of grime on the inside.

* The office coffee machine, you drank it because it contains caffeine.

* Noise pollution from loud phone calls about things you have nothing to do with.

* Air con

* Air con set to a temperature you would change if you could.

* Staff toilets in general. Men's urinals without divider partitions.

* The small-talk encounters replayed every day with slightly different arrangement of words. They can be enjoyable too, but this is a cynical list.

* Driving and public transport, they both suck.

* Alarm clocks. For the first time in my life I wake up at the right time without an alarm.

* Not being able to make really nice breakfasts that take more time to prepare. (Porridge using steel-cut oats requires a 25 minute simmer, for example).

We overheard every call because it was cubicle after cubicle in one big room. But hey! Let's complain about the customer that we just overheard you talking to for 30 minutes. Let's relive it after every call. Man.

Hey yeah, let's have our personal cell phone alert tone be a Linkin Park song at the loudest possible volume and always leave on their desk next to you. What a hell hole.

Micromanagement? You got it! You haven't experienced pedantry until you've met my supervisor. If you misspeak a word he pretends to not understand what you mean until you've re-spoken it in a way he understands. Now that we converse over chat/email almost entirely that ridiculous behavior has subsided.

They rarely cleaned the bathrooms thoroughly. One urinal. One stall. Just gross.

Microwave encrusted with who knows what. Janitors don't clean microwaves I guess?

I'm not one of those people that has very specific temperature needs. But of course we had one of those people that was very underweight in the office that needed it to be much warmer than normal. Why can't those people just wear more layers of clothing and not make the rest us suffer in sweat?

Parking? Okay that was close. If you can find a spot. I will never go back to the office. I will also quit my job first.

I am way more productive at home. I have ADHD and the distraction of an office environment is too much and makes it hard for me to concentrate. My productivity has never been higher. I don't dread going to work, I get paid enough that I do not need to find a better place. And I have been a remote worker since 2011 and never, ever want to go back to work in an office.

I feel like this is the key thing.

Instead of mandating blanket policies (whatever they are) that might not make sense for every team, trust your employees to self-organize in the way that makes the most sense for them and the way they work.

I'm in the same boat, and like you, doubt I will want to work any other way again.

If you are a pro-WFO person on a team that offers flexibility to WFH or WFO, but nearly everyone but you is WFH, then what do you do?

In contrast if you are a pro-WFH person but the rest of your team is in the office, you probably don’t care as much because the benefits you gain from WFH aren’t dependent on your coworkers.

It’s mesmerizing to me how so many think office life is a necessity for data entry work

Nevermind open source developers building the software world we rely on via email for decades.

I think it's more about how cities and communities are set up with commuting in mind.

Like, I live about an hour away from my best mate, which in London may as well be Mars. Bur our offices are literally 5 mins walk from each other, so messaging 'pint?' is SO much easier when in-office.

This is just an anecdote, and things have gotten better as the city has adjusted (gotten more involved in my local community for example) but I can 100% see why people are reluctant to change.

While this may work, some companies insist DevOps means involving the entire organization and all processes, rendering the word meaningless. So in face of such inflexibility, open source software developed for open source developers works a bit differently, much more flexible.

When covid struck initially, I kept my kid home with me. My job, aside from a daily standup and a weekly meeting, could be done while juggling my child. I worked really odd hours, bc I could. Early AM, later at night. But I got to protect my kid and my family from a disease I didn't know much about, for 15 months.

My new job disallows me to juggle him but it's still WFH. He started school anyways.

I exercise more. I meditate more. Go outside more - get little chores done, cut the grass on my lunch break rather than cutting in on family time.

The lack of a 45-115 min commute each way has been a lifesaver. Going to the doctor is faster and less time consuming bc my docs are near my home and not near my work. I can jog in the morning and still be to work "on time" rather than having to get up earlier and trade exercise for sleep.

And what's more.. When I do break, I get to see my wife. Or talk to my parents on the phone. At lunch I can catch up on a TV show, a podcast, a YouTube vid, that I'm interested in but my family might not be.

It affords me more ability to access my personal computer for things I might not do on a company machine.

I can do training videos and obligatory but time pointless and wasting meetings that never ask for my participation while in my "poor man's sauna" (hot bath + space heater in the room) or on a exercise bike or while walking around the block.

I miss being around people I like at work.

But alas.. I don't like anyone at my new job even a little

imagine working for an employer that treats you like a human being.